Research begun as a study of tenant initiated cooperatives in landlord-abandoned buildings in N.Y.C. has produced an unexpected finding. When we began our research, based on the housing and feminist literature, we expected that women would play a significant role in the transition from informal neighboring & support to cooperative ownership. Our research reveals that older minority women & some older men play a consistently critical role in bringing about cooperative ownership & management. The 34 tenants sampled are in 14 Tenant Interim Lease buildings in two Manhattan's Community Boards. The purpose of this proposal is to expand our study to the functioning of 50 older minority residents in program in which either a community based organization or a private manager provides a different tenure & management structure compared to a tenant initiated cooperative. The several measures of functioning identified in Tenant Interim Lease buildings include: holding leadership positions, bookkeeping, rent collection, organizing tenants, repairing apartments, securing the building through monitoring visitors, arranging money raising opportunities for building repair funds, volunteering activities with other age groups, & mutual aid for neighbors. We would expect to find other examples of functioning behavior in the comparison programs which will enable us to differentiate healthy & socially functional roles. We will examine how people in different settings, but all experiencing abandonment, conceptualize their lives as they grow older, especially the activities and social/physical context that contribute to & detract from a sense of life-satisfaction & self-worth. The results from the interviews will be content analyzed. The findings will lead to suggestions that might combine social & health programs in or near buildings in the programs, employ older persons as teachers, managers and consultants in similar housing and community settings, and propose programs for other aging populations to deal with problems of affordable housing, keeping intact informal care systems and encouraging new ones.